It was 3:15 AM on a Tuesday in 2018, and I was standing in a freezing warehouse in northern New Jersey staring at a puddle of industrial-grade degreaser that was slowly melting the finish off the floor. I had miscalculated the turning radius of a pallet jack. Simple mistake. Huge mess. My first thought wasn’t, “What a wonderful opportunity to grow my neural pathways!” My first thought was that I was a complete idiot and I was definitely going to lose this job before my health insurance kicked in.
We talk about mindsets like they’re software updates you can just download. Like you can just toggle a switch from “Fixed” to “Growth” and suddenly you’re Michael Jordan. But standing in that warehouse, smelling those chemical fumes, I realized that most of what we’re told about success is just a way to make us feel guilty for being human. We’ve been fed this diet of Carol Dweck’s research—which is fine, by the way, I’m not saying she’s wrong—but it’s been weaponized by HR departments to tell you that if you’re struggling, it’s a you problem, not a system problem.
The night I realized Carol Dweck wasn’t coming to save me
For those who haven’t spent too much time on LinkedIn, the Fixed Mindset is the belief that your qualities are carved in stone. You’re either smart or you’re not. The Growth Mindset is the belief that you can develop these things through effort. It sounds great on paper. It sounds like freedom. But in practice? It’s often used as a tool for gaslighting. I’ve sat through “Growth Mindset” workshops at three different companies now, and every single time, it was a prelude to the company asking us to do 20% more work with 0% more pay. “Don’t think of it as a crushing workload,” they say, “think of it as a challenge for your professional development!”
Anyway, back to the degreaser. I didn’t have a growth mindset that night. I had a “don’t get fired” mindset. I spent four hours scrubbing that floor until my knuckles bled. I didn’t learn a deep lesson about my potential. I just learned that degreaser is slippery. Sometimes, a failure is just a failure. It’s not a lesson. It’s not a stepping stone. It’s just a bad night at work. And I think we need to be okay with that. (I also think those industrial pallet jacks are designed poorly, but that’s a rant for another time.)
Why I’m officially bored of the “Growth Mindset”
I know people will disagree with me here, and they’ll point to all the studies about brain plasticity. I get it. The science is there. But the way we apply it is broken. We’ve turned “Growth” into this individualistic obsession. It’s all about my skills, my resilience, my career path. It’s incredibly lonely. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. It’s become a form of toxic productivity where you’re never allowed to just be good enough at something. You always have to be “evolving.”
I’ve met people who are perfectly happy being “fixed” in certain areas. My dad has been a mechanic for forty years. He doesn’t want to learn how to code. He doesn’t want to “disrupt” his workflow. He knows how a combustion engine works, he’s the best at it in his county, and he’s done. There is a certain dignity in reaching a plateau and staying there because you like the view. The obsession with constant growth is a recipe for burnout.
The most dangerous lie we’re told is that our value is tied to our rate of improvement.
I used to think that if I wasn’t reading a non-fiction book every week, I was falling behind. I was completely wrong. I was just tired. I was filling my head with other people’s frameworks instead of actually doing the work. I tracked my output for 14 weeks in 2021—I used a physical red notebook, no apps—and I found that my most “productive” weeks were the ones where I stopped trying to grow and just did the boring, repetitive tasks I already knew how to do. My output was 18% higher when I stopped “optimizing” my mindset.
The “Benefit Mindset” is the only thing that isn’t selfish
This is the part where I might sound like a hypocrite, but there’s a third mindset that actually makes sense to me: the Benefit Mindset. It’s a term coined by Ash Buchanan, and it’s basically the idea that growth is useless if it’s only for yourself. It’s about how your skills contribute to the “common good.”
Now, I hate the phrase “common good” because it sounds like something a politician says right before they tax your breath, but stay with me. When I was in that warehouse, I eventually stopped scrubbing because I wanted to save my job. I started scrubbing because I realized if I didn’t clean it up, the morning shift guys—who I actually liked—were going to slip and break their necks. That shift in perspective changed everything. I wasn’t growing for me. I was working for them.
- Fixed Mindset: “I’m a failure because I spilled this.”
- Growth Mindset: “I can learn to be better at driving this jack.”
- Benefit Mindset: “I need to fix this so the team stays safe.”
The Benefit Mindset is the only one that actually drives long-term success because it’s the only one that isn’t dependent on your ego. Growth Mindset is still about your ego—it’s just a more flexible ego. Benefit Mindset is about the people around you. It’s the difference between a doctor who wants to be the best surgeon in the world (Growth) and a doctor who wants to make sure fewer kids die of infections (Benefit). One of them retires when they stop being the best; the other one never stops.
I might be wrong about this, but…
I honestly think some people are just born with a ceiling. There, I said it. An editor would probably tell me to soften that, but I won’t. I will never be an elite marathon runner. No amount of “growth mindset” will change the way my ankles are built or the fact that I have the lung capacity of a Victorian chimney sweep. And that’s fine! We spend so much time telling people they can be anything that we forget to tell them they can be something.
I actively tell my friends to avoid those “hustle culture” influencers on Instagram who talk about mindset shifts while sitting in a rented Lamborghini. It’s all fake. It’s a performance. Real success—the kind that lasts 20 or 30 years—is usually pretty quiet and repetitive. It’s not a “paradigm shift.” It’s showing up when you don’t want to because someone else is counting on you.
I refuse to use Monday.com or Jira anymore, by the way. Everyone loves them, but I find them to be the ultimate “Growth Mindset” traps. They make you feel like you’re doing something because you’re moving a digital card from one column to another, but you’re not actually producing anything. You’re just managing the idea of work. I’ve gone back to paper and a basic Excel sheet that I’ve used since 2012. It’s ugly, it’s “fixed,” and it works perfectly.
How to actually drive success without losing your mind
If you want a recommendation that isn’t fluff, here it is: stop worrying about your mindset. It’s too meta. It’s like trying to watch yourself sleep. You can’t do it. Instead, just pick one person at your job or in your life who you actually care about and try to make their day 10% easier. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
When I focus on being “better,” I get anxious. When I focus on being “useful” to someone else, the anxiety disappears. It’s a weird glitch in the human brain, but it’s the only one I’ve found that actually holds up under pressure. Success isn’t about how much you’ve grown; it’s about how much of a gap you’d leave if you weren’t there.
I still think about that night in the warehouse sometimes. Not because it was a “growth moment,” but because it was the first time I realized that nobody was coming to help me. I had to do it myself, and I had to do it for the guys on the 7 AM shift. Is that a mindset? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just what being an adult is supposed to feel like. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out how to get the smell of degreaser out of my old work boots.
Stop optimizing. Start contributing.